Top 10 Secure In New U.S. News Ranking

by John A. ByrnePoets & QuantsAuthor on March 6, 2014

If Fuqua, Darden or Yale’s School of Management had any hope of cracking the Top Ten in U.S. News & World Report’s forthcoming ranking of the best graduate schools of business, they will have to wait until next year.

In a sneek peek its ranking expected to come out on March 11th, of the best graduate schools of business, U.S. News disclosed that last year’s Top 10 schools firmly remain in its new Top 10. The magazine published an alphabetical list of the ten highest ranked full-time MBA programs without their numerical ranks.

Schools that had a chance of breaking into the Top 10 party include No. 11 Duke University’s Fuqua School, No. 11 the University of Virginia’s Darden School, No. 13 Yale University’s School of Management, and possibly UCLA’s Anderson School and Michigan’s Ross School of Business, both tied for 14th place.

UNDERLYING INDEX SCORES FOR MANY SCHOOLS ARE VERY CLOSE

Based on U.S. News‘ underlying index scores for the schools, all of them are within one to five points of last year’s No. 10 school, New York University’s Stern School of Business. According to U.S. News, Stern had an actual “ranking score” of 87 to achieve its numerical rank of tenth place. Duke was right on its heels with an index score of 86, with Darden at 85, and Yale at 84. Both UCLA and Michigan had a score of 82.

Last year Yale fell behind NYU, Duke and the University of Virginia to land in 13th place, from tenth a year earlier. Yale recently made good progress in The Financial Times’ latest ranking, climbing four places to finish tenth. But the improvement was largely due to performing better in several of the FT’s international metrics–things that are not measured by U.S. News.

The fact that Fuqua, Darden and Yale failed to to edge their way into U.S. News’ Top 10 shows how entrenched the top of the rankings have become. MBA programs that are widely recognized as the best have brands that are nearly unshakeable. That’s especially true at the top of a list where the core metrics, such as average GMAT and GPA scores, starting salaries and bonus, and placement rates, often change little from year to year.

WHAT U.S. NEWS MEASURES

U.S. News’ methodology takes into account a wealth of proprietary and school-supplied data to crank out its annual ranking of the best business schools. The magazine does its own survey of B-school deans and MBA directors (25% of the score). This year, U.S. News said about 43% of those surveyed responded, but it did not reveal how many deans were actually surveyed or how many replied.

It also does its own survey of corporate recruiters (accounting for 15% of the overall ranking and for which 16% of those surveyed responded), starting salaries and bonuses (14%), employment rates at and three months after graduation (7% to 14%, respectively), student GMATs and GREs scores (about 16%), undergrad GPAs (about 8%), and the percentage of applicants who are accepted to a school (a little over 1%). This will be the second year U.S. News will include GRE scores in its ranking methodology.

U.S. News said it surveyed 453 accredited master’s programs in business to come up with this year’s ranking. In alphabetical order, here are the Top 10 highest-ranked business schools with their rank from last year:

School (state)

8) Columbia University (NY)

9) Dartmouth College (Tuck) (NH)

1) Harvard University (MA)

4) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)

10) New York University (Stern)

4) Northwestern University (Kellogg) (IL)

1) Stanford University (CA)

7) University of California—Berkeley (Haas)

6) University of Chicago (Booth)

3) University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)

The actual ranking and score of these and other graduate schools – including those offering full-time, part-time and executive MBA programs – will be available March 11.

You realize that all 3 of your criteria are claimed to be offered by every single business school out there,right?

Sloan is a great school, worthy of M7 status. But the whole Tech/ Entrepreneurship space is dominated by Stanford. Sloan plays second fiddle there. Booth appears to be replacing the space occupied by Wharton, if recent rankings and negative Wharton publicity are any indicators. And Kellogg is a pure strategy play with an overemphasis on Marketing and just plain nicer people than higher ranked Harvard.

Dutch Ducre

it’s the truth, sorry

avivalasvegas

The truth according to you my friend

Brick

Sorting the schools alphabetically instead of numerically has caused me great distress

FutureSupplicant

1. The question isn’t whats claimed by b-schools, its whats true…So I have no idea what your first point has to do with anything.

2. The question I asked was with regards to Kellogg and MIT. I don’t see what about either program would lead you to rank Kellogg ahead of MIT. If anything the wider course offerings and more accomplished MIT (university wide) network would push MIT ahead.

3. While the Entrepreneurship space leans strongly towards Stanford, the Technology space itself would lean towards MIT (If you surveyed people globally you’d overwhelmingly see that MIT is the bigger technology name (actually brand wise MIT would be second only to Harvard), and with the LGO program its hard to compete with in that area).

4. I’m trying to not get caught up in the whole “Wharton is falling” hype of the last year. What matters is hiring stats, and if you look at them you’ll see that Wharton is doing just fine. The idea that Wharton is being “replaced” by Booth is actually laughable.

Yale

Stern is just second rate.

Bob Marley

Who cares about those people?

Bob Marley

As to point 4, The University of Chicago is not “replacing” Wharton, it is taking its rightful place as the ‘father’ of modern finance … and making a run for leadership in marketing and strategy.

castor

Then Yale is 3rd + rate?

marin

The best and most reliable ranking- by far- is US news. Where is Stern and where is Fugua, Yale, and Darden. I know it hurts but its just a better school. Sorry.

avivalasvegas

To be honest, the differences between Stern and the Fuquas and Dardens of the world are marginal. So no big loss to them and no big gain for Stern really.

If we arbitrarily eliminate the schools that broke into the Top 5 only once, that means that there are only six US business schools that have managed to be ranked in the Top 5 by BW more than once. Moreover, the 60% of the schools ranked among the Top 5 in the US since 1988 have not changed! This means that only three schools have always been in the Top 5 (Kellogg, Wharton, Harvard) and generally three other schools have fought over the other two slots (Booth, Ross, Stanford) for 24 years.

To be sure, there’s lots of ways to analyze this data (e.g., the variability of one school’s rankings over time; the direction of the trend of one school’s ranking over time). I think that the observations shared above, however, underscore how little new data really appear in any rankings.

JustCurious

I honestly don’t know how Ross is ranked that high with a 40% admit rate last year.. and 33% this year. These admit rates are way above its considered peers (NYU, Darden, Cornell, Duke, etc)